Help me find the image manager of my dreams?

May 3, 2008 11:23 AM

I'm sitting on an extensive collection of ephemera and period clip-art. I use it a lot for designs, presentations, and assorted projects, but as it's grown organizing the contents has turned into an impossible task...

Is there a file/image management program out there that will let me keyword-tag the images, search them, browse thumbnails, and so on? My ideal solution would be a Spotlight-integrated tagging solution in Finder, and SpotMeta seemed perfect. Unfortunately, it's been abandoned and no longer works in Leopard.

posted by verb to Computers & Internet (12 answers total)

Try pichaus.com. It doesn't have everything you're looking for, but it is a tag-based (all description words end up being "tags") image saver.

This is perhaps a better solution for organizing online images, but the "upload from your computer" option is pretty painless.
posted by shownomercy at 11:50 AM on May 3, 2008

Punakea?
posted by misterbrandt at 11:53 AM on May 3, 2008

I use Microsoft Expression Media for this.

I haven't used the Mac version in a while (we use PCs at work and I don't have enough assets at home to justify using this on my personal Mac) but when it was called iView MediaPro a year or two back it worked just fine under Tiger. You might need to check out Leopard compatibility but I bet it's fine.
posted by bcwinters at 11:58 AM on May 3, 2008

(I should add that Expression Media isn't Spotlight- or Finder-integrated so it doesn't meet that portion of your requirements. But as for keyword tagging, searching, thumbnail views, lightboxes, etc, it seems to be what you're looking for)
posted by bcwinters at 12:00 PM on May 3, 2008

No answer here, but I hope Jessamyn sees this question. I have wondered what software the Library of Congress uses to catalog and manage their digital collection of photos, ephemera, etc.
posted by Gerard Sorme at 12:06 PM on May 3, 2008

Picasa for Mac is being launched later this year.
posted by alcopop at 12:31 PM on May 3, 2008

Response by poster: Thanks for the tips! I got a recommendation to try out TagBot, by http://bigrobotsoftware.com/, and I'm taking a look at it as well. If I were doing this via a web interface it would probably be easier, but I'm not sure I want to take on the task of managing that much data. The archive I'm hauling around currently weighs in around 12-14 gigs...

I'm taking a look at some of the options and will summarize in a little while.
posted by verb at 12:32 PM on May 3, 2008

Adobe Bridge might do the trick. I don't think you can buy it as a stand-alone product, but it's bundled with the Adobe Creative Suite. If you're a Photoshop or Illustrator user, it might be worth it to get the Creative Suite.
posted by lewistate at 4:55 PM on May 3, 2008

Adobe Lightroom works nicely for this kind of thing, though it might be overkill.
posted by signal at 9:55 PM on May 3, 2008

Best answer: QPict might be worth a look. It only runs $35 for a standard license. It's very similar to the former program iView MediaPro.

Not sure how it would handle 12-14 GB, but I imagine it would work a lot better than TagBot.
posted by the biscuit man at 10:06 PM on May 4, 2008

Response by poster: the biscuit man, thanks. I spent some time poking around with tagbot, and it looked promising, but qPict blew me away. There are a couple things I'd change, but it's 95% of what I've been hunting for -- a total home run!
posted by verb at 8:04 AM on May 6, 2008

@verb

Glad to hear that, I hope QPict is working out for you.
posted by the biscuit man at 10:27 PM on May 20, 2008